retrenchment is futile; and it ought to be futile, for a nation is richer by what it wisely spends communally, and poorer by all the cost of private indulgence. Every year the opportunities of travel, culture, and enjoyment, which formerly were the special preserve of the rich, are being made more and more accessible to the general public, always by co-operation or communal enterprise. Every year the purchasing power of large incomes proportionately declines; every year the State is levying a larger toll upon the material possessions a man leaves behind him when he dies, or the income he enjoys, without having earned it, while he lives. Every year the community is appropriating more of the proceeds of rent and interest and applying them to public uses. What can be the outcome of all this but the realisation of an industrial order in which co-operative production and co-operative consumption will go hand-in-hand, and the resultant output of wealth be enormously increased? Every year the State or the local authorities are increasing the number of organisations in which direct employment has to be given to thousands of workmen who receive a standard wage. It will only be a matter of time before a standard wage is insisted upon in all employments; and not so very much longer before all employments will be brought directly under communal control, either by the taking over of big concerns or by the addition of departments to the communal enterprises already existing. Thus we have, or

shall have, municipal dwelling-houses, bakeries, steamboats, fire insurance, hospitals, slaughterhouses, pawnshops, gasworks, electric works, tramways, milk distribution, laundries, and even nurseries. Where is this to stop? Why should it stop anywhere so long as it can be advantageously increased? and what can create the demand for commodities communally produced except public opinion? We may be quite sure that as soon as any special form of enterprise, even fruit selling or bicycle making, begins to be an interest in which the public as a whole is directly concerned, it will be taken out of private hands; in time there will not be much left for private capital to do, and not much capital to do it with. With education, housing, childfeeding, the minimum wage, and old age provided for, we have the foundation of a perfectly socialised State-and all these are here now, in embryo at least. Then indeed we can begin to hope for such a raising of the general level of culture and refinement that what is now the exception may become the common standard of attainment in a happy and enlightened fellowship of service. Not until our productive activities have become fully socialised will individual liberty in the fullest sense become possible.

CHAPTER X

THE SOCIALISED STATE (II)

In the survey we have now been making of the probable effects of the socialising of wealth and labour nothing has been said about Socialism certain outstanding problems in which and the human nature has as yet shown itself family. stronger than any code of regulations, however stringent. Of these, the most intractable and delicate is that of the relations of the sexes, with all the far-reaching consequences involved therein. It is repeatedly laid to the charge of Socialism that it involves free love, which is, I suppose, a euphemism for free lust. This charge, if true, would entirely justify the further assertion, so commonly made, that Socialism means the break-up of the family on which our Western civilisation rests. It would be useless to give a flat denial to these charges, for there is a small modicum of truth in them of which Socialists have no need to be ashamed. But that modicum of truth must not be confounded with the extreme utterances of the so-called Socialists who are really sexual anarchists. Of these there are very few, and not only do they not represent the

movement as a whole, but the movement as a whole would repudiate them entirely. Socialism ought no more to be judged by the eccentricities of a very few amongst its professed adherents than any other system, religious, moral, or political. Christianity has produced exponents of free love, and continues to do so from time to time, but no sane person would think of estimating Christianity by the utterances of such individuals. When I speak, therefore, of the modicum of truth which underlies the charge that Socialism would interfere with marriage and the family I do not mean that the Socialist movement shows any indication whatever of a tendency to encourage promiscuity in sex relations. What I do mean is that Socialism will do away with the unfair predominance of one sex, insist on the absolute equality of men and women before the law, and hold the parent responsible in a much higher degree than at present, as the trustee of the State, for the welfare of the child. The autocratic and proprietorial paternal government of the family is already having inroads made upon it, and in the socialised State those inroads would be greater still. But Socialism will continue to regard the highest form of sex relationship as the union of one man and one woman for life on the basis of mutual respect and affection; and it will so frame the regulations relating to marriage and divorce as to facilitate that end and remove all artificial hindrances from its realisation.

For what have we at present?

Let those

Prostitution.

who profess to tremble at the iconoclastic proposals of Socialism face the facts fairly and squarely. Modern Christian civilisation has to pay a dreadful price for the outward integrity of its family life. In every great city of the Western world there exists a class of women who live by hiring themselves to men whom they do not know and have never previously seen, and with whom their only bond is that of lust and lucre. In London alone it is estimated that the number of these women amounts to scores of thousands. Everybody knows this, and, in polite society, pretends not to know it. The women of Christendom are thus divided into two classes, those who have a status and those who have none. The former shrink in horror from the latter, reprobate them, or ignore their existence; the men regard the one class as their friends and companions, the other as the slaves of their passions. People will tell you frankly that prostitution is a necessity as human nature is at present, a disagreeable necessity, but one of the hard animal facts of life that cannot be got rid of. Is this true? I am quite sure it is not, and I hope to be able to show that Socialism has a remedy to offer for this evil also.

But before going on to examine the causes which necessitate the remedy, let us frankly recognise that the condition even of respectable womanhood cannot be deemed satisfactory under our present system. There is widespread misery